life
THE ISLAND AT WAR 1939 - 1945
the island at
war
By JUNE ELFORD
A great 12 part feature in which we look at different aspects which
took place on the island from 1939 - 1945. We talk to survivors, heroes
and in this first part we look at the vital role the Women's Land Army
played during those awful times.
T
he caption on a poster said ‘For
a healthy, happy job, join the
Women’s Land Army’. When
the government launched its recruiting
campaign in 1939, 17,000 young women
volunteered to join the WLA, many of
them attracted by the idealised picture on
the poster of a young woman, dressed in
a green jersey and fawn breeches, gazing
across golden corn fields.
The Women’s Land Army, formed during
the First World War to replace the men
who were away fighting, was disbanded
at the end of the war. But in 1939 the
Ministry of Agriculture, faced with an
acute labour shortage and the problem
of bringing in the harvest and getting an
extra two million acres of land ploughed
up and under crop by the following year,
approached Lady Gertrude Denman who
had been involved with the original WLA,
to establish a new Land Army.
Lady Denman discovered it was
difficult to find jobs for the girls who
had volunteered and to keep them on the
waiting list. She became increasingly
frustrated by the lack of co-operation
from the farmers and agricultural workers
when her female labour force was ignored,
especially when Ernest Bevin, Minister
of Labour, urged farmers who needed
extra help to apply instead to the Labour
Exchange.
The National Union of Agricultural
Workers’ problem was that they saw the
54
land girls as a threat to
undermine their fight
for better wages despite
the first land girls only
being paid twenty-eight
shillings a week, ten
shillings below the
average farm wage.
While the recruitment
posters had shown land
girls cuddling fluffy
lambs or leading docile
cart horses, the girls
soon found there was
nothing glamorous
about digging
ditches, ploughing
fields, harvesting
crops, milking cows
or catching rats.
They had been shop
assistants, bank clerks,
hairdressers, librarians
and secretaries and
now they were taking
on men’s jobs, working
long hours in all
weathers, often in poor
conditions and with
low pay and the girls
who had joined the
Women’s Timber Corps
(nicknamed lumberjills
instead of lumberjacks)
had to learn to fell
Photo Above: Kathleen Long pictured with horse & cart on a local
farm in June 1946
Island Life - www.isleofwight.net